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Akutagawa Ryuunosuke/Trivia
* Akutagawa's first name: Ryuunosuke (lit: son of the dragon), is taken from the time of his birth, as he is born in the hour of the dragon (following East Asian astrology), of the month of the dragon, of the year of the dragon. * After his mother, Niihara (née Akutagawa) Fuku went insane in Oct. 1892, seven months after his birth, Akutagawa moved in with Fuku's brother, Akutagawa Doushou. He is later formally adopted in 1904. Niihara Fuku is kept locked up in the Niihara household until her death in 1902. * He had two older sisters and one younger half-brother born to his biological father and his aunt. * Akutagawa was a great student - qualified one year earlier for middle school and was exempted from the entrance exam for high school. His setbacks were mostly health-related. * When he visited Nagasaki in 1919, he met Hide Shigeko and had a 'painful' affair with her, who he called a "crazy girl" in "A Fool's Life". In January, 1921, Hide bore a son and said that Akutagawa was the father. Partly to escape her, he left for China as a correspondent for Osaka Mainichi Shinbun. Unfortunately, this trip left him in ill health as well as spirits. * Later in life, Akutagawa, as the head of his family, was burdened with responsibilities. He had to take care of his sister's family, who had their house burnt down in the Great Kantou Earthquake and the husband committing suicide after being suspected of arson. The financial burden, arranging for a funeral, plus taking care of his aunt and his own family greatly damaged his health. * From April to August, 1927, he published the essay series Literary, All Too Literary, containing his side of the debate with Tanizaki Junichirou. Akutagawa, citing Shiga Naoya's works, upheld poetic lyricism as the primary value in the novel and discredited the role of structure. This is a complete turnaround of his early stance towards literature, showing how much he has changed in his approach towards writing. * He once asked his wife's friend, Hiramatsu Masuko, to a platonic double suicide. Hiramatsu passed this onto his wife and another friend, and they forced Akutagawa to drop the idea. * In contrast to Natsume Souseki, he did not write a single love story. In fact, women do not appear in his narratives nearly as often as men do. When they do appear, many are portrayed as selfish, aggressive, deceitful, dominating and ultimately destructive, while male figures are often described as victims of female dominance and venom. * Characteristics of his works are psychological insight, rejection of objective reality in favor of a reality defined by the perceptions of those involved, a fascination with the macabre, and material drawn from historical sources. * In many of his works, Akutagawa depicts the world as a sick, decaying organism with no law or reason. * Towards the end of his life, Akutagawa began to publish a number of autobiographical stories, a genre he had long resisted. * He died at age 35 due to suicide. Specifically, he took a dose of Veronal before bed and left last testaments to his family and friends by his pillow. He was pronounced dead by 7 AM the following morning. * Akutagawa's suicide, which he said in his suicide note was due to "a vague sense of anxiety" about the future, shook the entire literary scene of the time and marked the end of an era for 'bourgeois intellectuals' like him.